11xxx27 is the Italian electronic musician Erminio Granata (Code27), and he launched the project just over a year ago with his industrially textured Son of contaminated land EP. The artist returns on May 21st with Essence, an inaugural, limited edition tape release for Italy’s Infidel Bodies label. The upcoming effort continues 11xxx27’s exploration of solace and melancholy, but Essence is bathed in the colors of fading memory instead of the haunted urban landscapes explored on Son, and his release from January of this year, The reality is inexorably destined to decline. Droning hums and eerie resonances dominate those earlier works, but on Essence, 11xxx27 turns from the opaque and abstract instead using padded keys to explore mysterious pools of human emotion. This shifting of perspectives from cityscape to the realm of memory might be seen as a movement from external exploration to something more internal and personal, but it still bears the artist’s preoccupation with loneliness and the fragility of the human experience.

As “Pink Cloud” demonstrates, these tracks have a curious stasis to them. A realm of emotion opens up and the listener is invited to bathe there in the sounds without expecting them to develop into something new. Instead, we are given this solitary view, this single auditory/emotional vantage to survey. Brief and cinematic with bright shifting keys, “Pink Cloud” blows in with its’ iridescent color, but no sooner have we acclimated to its’ dreamy clime and 11xxx27 is off conjuring something new for us to feel/hear. The video for “Pink Cloud” further demonstrates this projects fascination with how we remember the past by presenting “home” footage of a family beach get-away, even date stamped back to 1998 and bearing the title “ON VACATION.”